Eye-candy galore! Running Ubuntu 8.10, with transparent panels, souped-up wallpaper and conky. Conky script from here.

I was bored last Friday so I did an Ubuntu upgrade. I’m now at v8.10 Release Candidate 1. Interprepid Abex is not a Long Term Support (LTS) which simply means this time around, you get only 18 months of support instead of 3 years. Of course, no one will stop you from upgrading to the next LTS version (9.04) in the near future. The official release of 8.10 should be around end of October, if no show stopper bugs surface. I’ve now got all the latest she-bangs, what-nots and the tingling feeling you get when running the latest and greatest version of your operating system

Ubuntu.com has the list of new features and new bugs.

Upgrade was performed by invoking the update manager, either through the UI (System -> Preference -> Update Manager) or invoking it via a terminal (sudo update-manager -d)

A couple of upgrading hiccups -

1. if you’ve got OOF3.0 installed, it’s gonna be wiped out and replaced with OOF2.4.1 when you upgrade via the update manager. You’ll need to uninstall OOF2.4.1 and reinstall v3 of the office suite.
2. lost AWN, but that was fixed rather quickly but issuing sudo apt-get install awn-manager.
3. lost most of my Compiz Fusion settings but not a big problem since you’d just need to reconfigure them. I also encountered terrible performance initially, but that’s fixed too.
4. had a weird problem where all my shortcuts and my home folder would by default be launched using file-roller (aka Archive Manager) instead of Nautilus. Fixed that by re-setting the default program to Nautilus for the folders and bookmarks.

Other than those few problems, upgrade went rather well. Do check out the ‘what’s new’ list, you’ll find that upgrading is very worth your time. Great work and congrats to the Ubuntu developers. Another great release.

The recent version of Compiz included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) resulted in pretty terrible performance. In short, it made me feel like not running the damn thing. Of course, I would never give up my eye-candy (one of the reasons for using Ubuntu hehe). Turns out that Intel’s 965 graphics adapter has issues rendering video with Compiz under certain conditions and was put under a hardware blacklist. The blacklist most probably made Compiz ran in software mode (CPU spikes all over), though I didn’t confirm this (I could not really be bothered). Compiz Fusion’s wiki states this reason for the blacklist - “XV does not play with XAA under compiz, only with EXA“.

If Compiz Fusion is running too slow and you suspect it’s a hardware support problem, check out Compiz-Check. Running it gives a simple diagnostic so that you can take it from there.

Admittedly, I’ve not synced any PRC files before today. That does not mean I’ve never Hotysnc my Centro before. Nor does it mean I’ve never installed any Palm program since the last few months that I’ve been on Ubuntu. Usually I’d have my cable in my bag and being the lazy bum that I am, I’d just Bluetooth the files over. Today however, I did have my cable out (needed to charge the thing) and guess what? I couldn’t figure out how to sync the damn files over!

Turns out, I need to drag the file to the tiny gpilot applet on my deskbar. Man, can’t these things be documented somewhere? But there ya go, it can be done. To those still using the archaic Palm OS, that’s the trick.

See unlike Microsoft Office, this one’s free to download and use, no strings attached. Updates are free too. Installing in Ubuntu is as simple as:

1. Uninstalling the previous version (sudo apt-get autoremove openoffice*.*)
2. Downloading the new version (wget http://openofficeorg.secsup.org/stable/3.0.0/OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz) *feel free to use any other mirrors
   
3. Extracting it (tar -xvzf OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz)
4. Navigating to the extracted folder (cd OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358)
5. Installing it (sudo dpkg -i *.deb)
6. Placing the proper shortcuts for your desktop (cd desktop-integration, followed by, sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb)

It should appear in the Office menu. Nope, running command-lines are not necessary, but heck, it’s simpler coz then you’d be able to copy-paste from the web into the console and let the installation run.

Source: Installing OpenOffice.org 3.0 - Linux Magazine Online, Install OpenOffice 3.0 Final in Ubuntu | Quick Tweaks

rsync is a tool common to the Linux operating system. What’s unique about rsync is that after the initial backup, subsequent ones only backup updated files. This means that backups are really fast (important if you are backing up to remote directories via the network). After switching over from Windows not too long ago, I had not been backing up my documents, something I tend to do regularly. Since source codes gets backed up to the cvs, this is the only backup that I need. Here’s a quick command to do rsync:

rsync -arvu –no-o –no-g [source dir] [target dir]

Here’s a breakdown of what the rsync command does: a= archive, r= recursive, v= verbose, u= update, –no-o=do not change ownership, –no-g=do not change group. Since I backup to a flash drive, the target dir for Ubuntu users would be /media/[flash drive name]. I actually backup 3 dirs to the drive; my linux documents directory and 2 other windows documents dir. To automate the thing, I put the 3 rsync commands into a backup.sh script that I run every few days or so. If you’re running the backup to a remote directory, you can even cron the backup script to run periodically. Cool eh?

Source: How to use rsync to backup files in Linux « Midspot, rsync chgrp error since upgrading to 7.04 - Ubuntu Forums